Black teens fined heavily in suburbs
Anyone wants to know what systemic racism looks like can read this story from Repentigny in which one set of teenage boys playing pickup basketball is fined $1,500 each, while another set – playing the same game on the same day in the same place – is let off with a warning. No prizes for guessing it’s the Black kids who got ticketed.
walkerp 22:20 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Just so infuriating. Note this: “But she also acknowledged that police were responding to a call from a civilian about Black youths playing basketball”. What is the Quebecois name for Karen?
If you have ever wondered why there are tennis courts but no basketball court at parc Jeanne-Mance, here’s a clue.
david232 22:22 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Who knows the real story. I can believe that some Repentigny cops busted some kids they’d been dealing with repeatedly and finally hammered them with the big fine, when maybe they’d have chased them off yet again if they hadn’t been Haitian. I can also believe that this kid is lying when he claims that a group of whites were not ticketed for doing the same just 15 minutes later.
We’re all primed to believe the worst about francophones and cops and people from Repentigny, but we don’t know.
walkerp 22:38 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
No, we’re all primed to believe that black people deserve whatever cops do to them as evinced by your ignorant comment.
david232 22:43 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Kids break the laws repeatedly, get fined. Said kids claim – without evidence – that whites were doing the same thing and didn’t get fined.
Online poster 1: Perfect example of how awful our society is.
Online poster 2: Maybe our society is awful, this story could be true, it could be false, we don’t know.
Online poster 1: A comment like this means that you believe cops should target blacks, you’re part of the problem, your comment offends me.
Great!
Kate 22:56 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
I can’t get my head around the sense of fining teenage kids $1,500 for playing a game in the outside air. Granted, Quebec keeps changing the rules, but the item notes “non-contact sports were authorized a few days earlier and, that day, small outdoor gatherings were allowed.”
These kids have to challenge those tickets. With any luck, a sensible judge will cancel them, but who knows how this will go. I hope CBC reports on how it pans out. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me had I come home at 16 or 17 to tell my folks they had to pay a $1,500 ticket for me.
Michael Black 23:35 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Change is about balance, and enpathy helps to rebalance.
Racism shouldn’t be defined by someone spewing hate, but by the people who suffer from it.
I’ve said it before, my great great grandmother Henrietta wrote in 1853 in Red River that she’d not go to Canada because she was concerned about being an “uneducated dark half breed look among the fair & accomplished ladies”. She’s wrong on both accounts, but racism makes people distrust themselves.
Racism isn’t a single incident. It keeps happening and grabs ahold of someone. It colors how people see the world. If it happened before, there might be legitimacy this time, but that feeling of being targeted is very real. It’s not “opportunity”.
Black Lives Matter is about that racism, not just the tip of the iceberge of brutality and death. It’s not just about initial racism, someone must be a criminal because they are black or native, but how it is handled. No need to apologize because criminals don’t need to be treated nicely, and too.much force is okay because they are criminals.
That time forty years ago when the undercover cops disappeared so one could threaten me with a beating, maybe it was only a threat because I am “white”. I don’t know. But the weird thing is that my “white privilege”, somewhat dubious given all the times I was stopped while walking along busy sidewalks, comes from racism. “Let’s be white, it’s simpler”. Whatever happened to my family can be amplified when it comes to the distant cousins and Black people. Nobody should wish to be somebody else.
Dan 07:02 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
@David at this point I assume you’re adding a random number to your name every time you comment here so that one day you can plausibly deny it was you who spewed all the racist crap that you do on this blog.
Ephraim 09:52 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Those kids need to not just challenge the tickets, they need to open a file at the commission. When the commission is so inundated with these files… they might do something. I’ll make you bets that the chief of the station is already in process to get those tickets cancelled and apologize… just to keep them from taking it to the commission. But that’s where it needs to go… where they can look at the calls of the day and see if there was discrimination.
Meezly 09:53 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
I was half expecting davidxxx to say that there are no black people in Repentigny, period.
Uatu 10:42 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Why the fines? Didn’t Christian Rioux say that Haitians were the noble blacks unlike the uncouth ‘muricans? ;P